My actual job title doesn't make much sense to most people. So I usually just tell people that I'm a project manager or management consultant. When individual facilities or divisions are not performing to a parent company's expectation, people like me are sometimes called in to assess the situation. For months, and sometimes years, I work with operations to get them up to speed... or help management/ownership decide whether or not a particular facility or division is ever going to be able to achieve a future state that is desirable (for the money/resources that they are willing to devote). In other cases, we go into facilities which are newly acquired (most often by private equity). There we do a "gap analysis" to determine the resources necessary to get the operation to the next level vs. the benefits of getting it there. Unfortunately, some facilities are not worth saving. So they're either combined with other facilities, re-located or just wiped out totally.
For the most part, I like my job. I most enjoy working with skilled floor employees. Once they get over thinking that I'm a know-it-all/read-it-in-a-book "suit" and can actually relate to them and have a great deal of respect for what they do, in many/most cases we can do some amazing things. Not all management consultants feel that way. Some know that the quickest way to score a fat bonus is to just cut some heads, scare the remaining workers into doing what you decide they should be doing... and move on to the next case. Plant level management is the group that I usually do not enjoy working with. This group is most often the primary or root cause of the company's issues. But it's also the group that wants you to *think* that it's the workers who are to blame. I typically cull many more people from management than I do from the floor. See, if you tell me that you have stupid, lazy, unmotivated workers, if you're the one who hired them, guess who I blame? :dunno:
I got into this because at a previous company, while I was having a chat with a VP of marketing during a company function, I was trying to convince him to broaden our sponsorship to a racing series called Toyota Atlantic. We were in CART, Trans Am, Indy Lights and I think NASCAR Craftsman Trucks. But I thought the Atlantic series would give us an "in" with Toyota. It never worked out. But I guess he liked my delivery. So he and another fellow I knew put my name forward to be in a sort of "internal affairs" group that was being formed at corporate.
The weirdest part of that selection was having to take a psychological test before being fully accepted into the group. They apparently wanted people who could empathize with others, but not be so sentimental that personal feelings would prevent them from doing whatever the data told them SHOULD be done. In short, they wanted to know whether or not you would fire your crippled, aged mother if the data showed that she was doing a poor job. So after showing myself to be something of a sociopath, I walked into what has proven to be a new and interesting career path.
